by Dixie Lyle
* * *
“Lieutenant Forrester,” I said.
“Ms. Lancaster,” he replied. Forrester was a cop on the Hartville police force, which was too small to support a full-time detective but could afford one willing to pull double duty as a uniformed officer in a patrol car as well. I wasn’t sure how the police union felt about that, but Forrester seemed okay with it. Today he was in plainclothes, which meant a dark-blue suit and tie. He’d gotten rid of the dreadlocks he used to wear, which I suppose made him look more professional. Too bad; I liked them.
“You’re really trying to fast-track my career, aren’t you?” Forrester said as he surveyed the blast damage. “Now I’ll have to take night courses in bomb disposal, too.”
I almost made a joke about killer homework, then thought better of it. I’d already shown him the body, and neither of us was really in the mood for humor. “Sorry. At least the blast didn’t kill anyone.”
“Yet,” he said. “Natalia Cardoso is comatose and the hospital doesn’t know if she’ll pull through. Has Maurice Rolvink been located?”
“No. But his cell phone is still in his room, along with his wallet. I think we might have already found him, if you know what I mean.”
Forrester nodded, his face gloomy. “Yeah, the corpse fits his description. But there’s no identifying marks on it, including fingerprints. We’ll have to wait for DNA results before we know for sure. What are your thoughts on this, Ms. Lancaster?”
I hesitated. “I’m no detective. But if the body in the trailer does turn out to be Rolvink, the bomb might have just been insurance. Apparently he and Natalia were spending time together.”
“So she might have been collateral damage. Pretty cold-blooded, since she was almost certain to have been killed along with Rolvink.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. But neither of them was terribly popular, at least around here. Natalia was a full-blown diva and Rolvink was—or maybe still is—an arrogant womanizer.”
Forrester eyed me neutrally. “Sounds like you’re putting yourself on the suspect list.”
“Me? I’m the one who has clean up this mess. Or, you know, hire the people that are actually going to do it.”
He sighed. “I know, I know. You’re too busy to blow people up. You’d probably just outsource it.”
“So I couldn’t be an assassin, but I’m capable of hiring one?”
He smiled. “From what your employer tells me, you’d probably contact a dozen, interview six, and then take bids on the job.”
I pretended to look offended. “I never take bids. I’d average the quotes and take the third from the top.”
“Why that one?”
“The highest quote is always overpriced. The second highest is good, but never as good as they think they are. Third from the top is competent, experienced, and just a little bit hungry. The rest are playing it safe or desperate.”
“See? This is why I asked for your thoughts, Ms. Lancaster. You always have an excellent grasp of the facts.”
“It’s what I’m paid for. Speaking of which, if you’re done talking to me I should really get back to it.”
“Go ahead. I’ll be in touch later with some questions.”
I nodded good-bye and left. Most of the explosions I dealt with were more metaphorical than actual, but the process of cleaning up the aftermath was surprisingly similar: make sure everyone was okay, assess the damage done, figure out what needed to be fixed immediately and what could wait, then get in touch with the appropriate professionals and start collecting quotes. The part of my brain in charge of making lists—which was at least a third of my cerebellum—had already started listing all the lists I needed to list. Listy, list list.
But I couldn’t listen to my list-lust, because there was something much more important I needed to do first. Just to appease that part of my brain, I put it on a list of its own with only one item:
1. Question the honey badger.
Because, despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence that pointed to Owduttf chowing down on the corpse, Tango’s mention of the Unktehila had me questioning that theory. What if the honey badger was being framed? What if Owduttf had eaten some of the remains, but wasn’t the killer? What if the head and hands had been removed for another reason, and the chewing done afterward?
However, while I am able to converse with animal spirits, holding conversations with living beasties is beyond my abilities. Fortunately, Tango is fluent in the tongues of many species, including Honey Badger.
But first I had to find her.
I took the back stairs down to the main floor, which was unfair to all the people waiting to talk to me but utterly necessary. Whiskey! I called in my mind. Have you located our erstwhile kitty?
He replied right away. [I have. She’s in the cabana, cowering under a pile of towels.]
I headed straight there. Thankfully, at this time of year the cabana didn’t see a lot of use, which is probably why she picked it.
The door was ajar. I poked my head inside and saw Whiskey lying on the floor by what I can only describe as a mountain of towels. The last time I’d been in here they’d all been neatly stacked and on top of a wicker table; now it seemed they’d been turned into some sort of fluffy termite mound.
“She’s under there?” I said.
[She’s under there.]
“Tango? It’s okay. You can come out now.”
Nothing happened.
“Um. Tango? Why aren’t you coming out?”
I sighed and sank onto a wicker chair. “Right. Okay. Do you want to talk about it?”
[That sounded suspiciously like a request for help.]
[From a cat hiding under a pile of towels.]
“Whiskey, you’re not helping. Tango, I need you. Now. We’ve got a honey badger to interrogate and I have to do it before Forrester figures out where the missing body parts have wound up.”
“Invisible mice?”
“Armed invisible mice. Armed with what, cocktail toothpicks?” I knew I shouldn’t be encouraging the direction this conversation was taking, but sometimes after diving into the rabbit hole all you can do is fall.
[Shouldn’t that be mouse-apults?]
“Again, not helping. Tango, I can assure you that there are no legions of invisible warrior mice in the immediate vicinity.”
Well, she had me there. “Look, those mice weren’t real. You were hallucinating.”
[Oh, this should be good.]
I scowled at him. “No stuctural damage, kitty. Shouldn’t tiny siege engines leave dents in the wall? I have observed no such dentage.”
“Superballs. You mean those little bouncy things you get from vending machines?”
[The real mystery here is where invisible mice carry spare change.]
“No, the real mystery is why I put up with either of you—one’s a dope fiend and the other’s just a fiend. Now com
e on out—it’s time to go to work.”
A black-and-white head emerged from under the towels and looked up at me through slitted eyes.
I groaned, but I could tell I wasn’t going to convince her. Well, maybe I couldn’t interrogate our resident appetite on four legs yet, but at the very least I could make sure Owduttf stayed put.
I hoped.
* * *
You might think it would be difficult to get through a crowd of confused and frightened actors, film crew members, domestic staff, and houseguests, and normally you’d be right. The fact that pretty much all of them knew me as the person to go to when they had a question or a request made this even harder, and the police presence just put a cherry on top of the pressure cooker.
So I didn’t go through the crowd, I went around them. Out the back, behind the cabana, along the hedge, between the tennis courts and the stable, down the path only the gardener uses, and through a side gate onto the zoo grounds. Easy peasy, only a little squeezy. With Whiskey’s nose to alert me to anyone coming toward us, we managed to make it to the honey badger pen without getting caught—though my cell phone was buzzing like a hive full of frustrated bees. I switched it to silent mode and put it away. ZZ would be upset that I wasn’t answering, but I had to take care of this before anything else and I couldn’t exactly explain my actions: Oh, yeah, sorry I wasn’t around to do my job during the emergency, but I had to discuss the dinner plans of our South African badger. No, I wasn’t scheduling it as an activity, it was more along the lines of an exit interview. Yes, I could explain that in further detail, but believe me, you wouldn’t enjoy it.
Whiskey and I headed for the menagerie’s clinic, a blocky one-story building painted a bright green. I strolled through the front door and found Caroline, our resident vet, giving eardrops to a skunk. The skunk wasn’t happy about it, but Caroline seemed unfazed.
“I hope she’s descented,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Caroline cheerfully. “What’s up, Foxtrot?”
[The skunk’s tail,] Whiskey noted from the doorway. [She is not pleased. I believe I’ll stay outside.]
“The honey badger’s getting out at night,” I said.
“What? Not again. I just finished putting all that work into a new enclosure.” The skunk in her arms was making quite the racket, alternating between hissing and squealing like a pig.
“I know, I know. But somehow, he is. I have it on reliable authority.”
“Did your reliable authority tell you how he’s doing it, or where he is now?” She carefully put three more drops in the skunk’s ear, then deposited the animal in a small wire-mesh cage on the floor. It glared at her resentfully and squealed some more.
“He’s back in his pen. And no, I don’t know how he’s doing it.”
Caroline frowned. She was a plump, pretty blonde who put the health and safety of her animals above everything else. “So he escaped, was seen, and now he’s returned on his own? Do I want to know what he was up to while he was out?”
“No. Plausible deniability is your bestest friend.”
She sighed. “Okay. I’ll give his compound the once-over. You think ZZ’s willing to spring for a guard tower, spotlights, and a twenty-four-hour security detail?”
“Unlikely. But security cameras might be doable.”
“I suppose. As long as he doesn’t eat them.”
The skunk had finally quieted down, still hissing now and then but mostly whimpering. Caroline glanced down at her and said, “Oh, come on, it wasn’t that bad. You’ll thank me when those ear mites are gone.”
[I doubt that,] said Whiskey when I walked out the door. He was waiting for me on the sidewalk, sitting erect with his ears perked up. [I may not speak Skunk, but I know profanity when I hear it.]
I kept walking, and Whiskey got to his feet and followed along behind me. “Hopefully Caroline can put a stop to Owduttf’s nighttime rambles. Right now I’ve got a billion other details to take care of.”
[Like uncovering who used high explosives on the house?]
I shook my head. “I can’t even think about that at the moment. Every single person who works, lives, or visits the mansion is going to want something from me the second I enter their field of vision, and almost all of them are going to have to wait until after I take care of all the absolutely essential details first: electrical, plumbing, structural integrity. Once those ducks are lined up, then I can start thinking about secondary effects: smoke damage, water damage, broken windows and appliances. I will no doubt have to hold the hands of anyone who was shaken up—those who still have hands, anyway—probably book a few hotel rooms and maybe even schedule some counseling sessions. All while trying to whittle down the—” I broke off, yanked out my phone, and brandished it at Whiskey. “—twenty-seven phone calls I need to respond to immediately.”
[Please don’t brandish that at me. You know I don’t approve of brandishing.]
“Sorry.” I put the phone away. “Suddenly feeling a little stressed.”
[That’s understandable.]
The first person I had to deal with, of course, was ZZ.
“Foxtrot!” she said as I walked in the front door. She’d removed the zombie makeup and Victorian garb, and was wearing a bright-purple plush bathrobe. “Thank goodness! Where were you? I’ve been trying to reach you for the last hour!”
It was more like forty minutes, but pointing that out wouldn’t exactly endear me to her. “My phone battery died,” I said. “I couldn’t get to my spare because it was in my office and the police had that blocked off so I went to my car and then got sidetracked by talking to one of the film crew who needed to go off-site but the police wouldn’t let them leave and now here I am. What do you need?”
She blinked. “Well, let’s see. My house is broken. Is somebody going to fix it?”
I took a deep breath, and smiled. “I have top people on it. Top people.” Which wasn’t true, precisely, but was about to be.
Then the next few hours sort of blurred by. Which isn’t to say all the various, intricate, interlocking details of those hours were blurry; oh, no, they were sharp and clear and very, very numerous. It was the time itself that seemed to rush past in a great, shimmery wave, one punctuated by many mugs of tea, a hundred or so phone calls, and an endless parade of worried, confused people marching through my office.
But I got it sorted.
By the time dinner was in sight, I’d pretty much broken the back of the crisis. Things were far from over, but all the necessary parts had been set in motion; all I had to do now was make sure it kept moving. Damages had been assessed, contractors had been contracted, schedules had been adjusted, and the nervous had been reassured. All in a day’s work for the mighty Foxtrot, slayer of cataclysms.
The police had finally left, after cordoning off the room the blast had occurred in. Maurice Rolvink was still missing.
I stood up, stretching and yawning. My brain was buzzing from all the caffeine, but also the aftereffects of a major adrenaline high. That’s the thing about emergencies; when they’re happening every neuron you’ve got is firing like mad, and when it’s over you crash. Hard.
I didn’t want to crash. I wanted to figure out exactly what was going on that had produced an explosion, a coma, and a corpse.
Rolvink. Was that his body Whiskey and I had found? And if it was, did Owduttf kill him? Why were the head and hands gone? Who blew up Natalia Cardoso’s room, and why?
I’m something of a research fiend, and I do a certain amount of background work on each of ZZ’s guests. I already knew Maurice Rolvink was a producer, one who specialized in low-budget, direct-to-video B-movies. That was the easy-to-access stuff; now it was time to dig
a little deeper.
So I sat right back down, and I dug.
Some time later, I heard a scratching at the door and a whine. I rubbed my eyes, got up, and opened the door to let Whiskey in. He brushed past me with a disapproving look. [I’ve been out there for five minutes. Were you asleep?]
“No, no, just preoccupied. Why didn’t you braincast me?”
[I did. I got absolutely no response, which is why I asked if you were asleep.]
“Huh.” I sat back down, and Whiskey jumped up on the couch. He’s allowed; ectoplasmic fur doesn’t shed. “Sorry. Guess I was just really focused on what I was doing.”
Whiskey sniffed the air delicately. [Ah. Hot on the cybernetic trail, are we? I can smell the search engine.]
“You cannot. Google does not have a scent.”
[I was referring to you, not the computer.]
“I refuse to believe that how I smell changes when I’m doing research.”
He yawned. [I’m not surprised; humans simply can’t appreciate olfactory nuance. What’s got your medulla oblongata in such a frenzy?]
“Maurice Rolvink.” I tapped the screen of my laptop with a fingernail. “I knew he was sleazy, I just didn’t know how sleazy.”
[And now you do?]
“Listen to this. Twenty years ago he was selling used cars. Fifteen years ago, he was running his own mail-order scam out of Honolulu that was shut down by the feds. He didn’t do any time, but several of his employees did. Ten years ago he hit it big with his own online gambling site, which tanked about two seconds after he sold it for far more money than it was worth. Hard to say where the money went, but he seems to have spent the next few years partying hard with some very questionable people, most of whom had a lengthy criminal record. Seven or so years ago he got interested in low-budget film, which he seems to have stuck with until the present day.”
Whiskey put his head down on his paws. [So he’s finally found a legitimate business to invest in?]
“Not so much. In economic terms, movies are an exotic beast; they spend bunches of money on bunches of things, and they do it very quickly. Independent films don’t have a lot of oversight, and I found at least one article speculating that organized crime might be using that to launder money.”
